Jakarta. It's not always easy being a reformist minister in Indonesia, as Sudirman Said, the country's energy minister, made plain in remarks on Friday.

Soon after he took office in October 2014, President Joko Widodo put Said in charge of cleaning up the crooked energy sector. Now the minister seems rather jaded by his job.

"There was no minister as unlucky as me," Sudirman told an anti-corruption hearing in the city of Bandung, according to a media statement posted on the energy ministry's website.

"There were no other ministries where the minister is in prison, the secretary-general is in prison, the head of the oil and gas regulator is in prison and several members of the (parliament) energy commission are in prison."

Soon after he took office, Sudirman launched a major shakeup of the graft-tainted ministry, requiring all top directors to re-apply for their jobs.

The minister recently went public with recordings of a conversation in which parliament speaker Setya Novanto allegedly tried to extort shares in the local unit of Freeport McMoRan Inc , which operates one of the world's biggest copper and gold mines in eastern Indonesia.

Indonesia, an archipelago of some 250 million people rich in resources, is routinely ranked by watchdog Transparency International as one of the world's most corrupt countries.

Sudirman's predecessor, Jero Wacik, stepped down in September 2014 after being named a suspect in a case involving extortion and kickbacks worth about $841,000.

A few months before that, the former head of Indonesia's energy regulator, SKK Migas, Rudi Rubiandini was jailed for seven years for taking more than $1 million in bribes from the owner of a Singapore-based oil company.

Reuters